Want to know if you're working with an elite agency? Ask them how they deliver reports.

This single aspect can serve as a microcosm for what their performance is like in all other facets.

From a software perspective, client management represents a unique opportunity to automate reporting. Think about it: instead of cutting and pasting numbers into report templates in Excel or PowerPoint, an agency can point clients to a dynamic, real-time dashboard.

In other words, the agency is presenting a report that their client can understand in seconds.

Every agency I've worked with remembers winning their first client. They remember the hustle and thrill, but they also remember the care and concern they showed that first client at every step of the way.

This attention to detail and quality is notoriously difficult to maintain as agencies grow their portfolio. Again, this is where automated dashboards come in.

They take time to build, but once they're live and even templatized they can allow agencies to maintain top-notch reporting across their entire client base.

But digital agencies aren't just using dashboards for their clients.

Used internally, dashboards allow agencies to increase productivity and foster a culture of data transparency that can drive value across their firm.

While we provide lots of examples of how agencies can display marketing dashboards for their clients, I thought it’d be valuable to show five dashboards that agencies are using to monitor their own business.

Financial Management Dashboard

Project Management Dashboard

Inbound Prospecting Dashboard

Client Alerts Dashboard

Marketing Performance Dashboard

1. Financial Management Dashboard

Let's take it from the top. Agencies must manage the billing side of their client relationships.

Juggling multiple clients and different account types requires systems and processes, and a financial management dashboard paves the way for both.

It’s a useful way to inform everyone on the team about opportunities to improve the numbers. I recommend focusing this dashboard around these metrics:

Adjusted Gross Income (AGI)

Client Income (Actual vs. Estimated)

Accounts Receivable Aging

Number of Proposals Submitted

Pipeline by Expected Close Date

Client Income (Actual vs. Estimated) KPI Sample

How are individual clients contributing to the business? Agencies must track not only how much income each client drives, but if each client is increasing or decreasing their commitments.

2. Project Management Dashboard

Process and project management allow creative teams to thrive. Growing agencies are often managing dozens of projects across multiple clients and, well, keeping that straight is a Herculean task.

Enter the project management dashboard. It consolidates their process into a single view, and allows them to associate targets with their deliverables.

Agencies typically track the following metrics on this dashboard:

Project Updates

Billable vs. Unbillable Hours per Employee, Per Team/Project

Lost Hours Report

New Business Opportunities by Rep

Number of Data Driven Audits Completed

Project Updates KPI Sample

Who’s doing what and when? Project management tools like Trello, Asana, and Basecamp make it easy to track progress. And tracking progress is made even easier when everyone on your team has complete visibility.

3. Inbound Prospecting Dashboard

How do agencies find new clients? The truth of agency growth is that it requires quite a bit of hustle.

It’s time-consuming and an essential part of the business, but many agencies neglect to implement any formal processes around how they do it, let alone organize what the data is telling them about their performance.

I’ve watched marketing agencies grow sustainably and over the long-term when they create an editorial-like level of organization around their inbound efforts.

Agencies should consider the following metrics for their prospecting dashboard:

Visits

Avg Time on Site by Device

Session Duration

Goal Conversions by Page

Keyword Ranking on Top Terms

Bounce Rate

Conversion Rate

Page Performance

Website Performance

Ground-zero for any inbound strategy is your website. Understanding acquisition channels is critical to sustained growth. Bonus: this is a metric an agency's clients will want as well.

4. Client Alerts Dashboard

Digital agencies can get creative here. Some display a TV dashboard of their client’s social channels, while others use TV dashboards to highlight client growth metrics.

Here are a few metrics I've seen agencies showcase on their dashboards:

Social Media Handles

Google News Alerts (Using IFTTT)

Client Case Studies

Client Testimonials and NPS Score

Social Media Command Centre

Easy to set up (thanks to a pre-built connection) and even easier to use, the social command centre helps digital agencies keep their client’s front and center. Simple as that.

5. Marketing Performance Dashboard

While agencies, of course, must keep their clients front and center, they'll need to take their own marketing performance just as seriously. Here are a few metrics many agencies use to track their own marketing metrics:

Traffic & Lead Conversion

Channel Effectiveness

Content Effectiveness

Campaign Performance

Search Engine Marketing

Social & Community Engagement

Digital Advertising

Content Effectiveness

When you pair content marketing and SEO, you get the dynamic duo of inbound marketing. Andy Crestodina helped us prototype (this dashboard) and agencies love it because it allows them to see which content is attracting and converting visitors, as well as what opportunities exist.

Lastly, how do agencies find their data?

So where does all this data come from? Here are some common Marketing Agency Tool Stacks that we see (Minimum Agency Toolkit):